#tranxio

i will take moderately intimidating mitigated by my innate sense of decency, thank u!

The mages call themselves a guild, and you go through the stages of apprentice - journeyman - master. This is mostly because in a lot of ways magic is a craft, or rather needs mastery of a lot of different crafts - things work better for magic if you've made them yourself, so you need to be able to blow glass for vessels and make your own dyes and inks and tan your own leather to make books, and and and... 

The masterwork is a thesis, which then goes into the Guild library, but there's also a practical component - you don't become a master for theory alone, it has to also work. 

The common people are generally afraid of mages, in part because the Guild wants to keep magic as mysterious as possible, because they're trying to protect their power (they have a lot of it because of the practical effects that they, and they alone, can create) and not let people know that honestly, pretty much anyone can do magic. 

Being a mage is similar to being an alchemist and a natural scientist, but with the full support of the institution - having a mage be destitute on the street hurts the prestige of the Guild, so every full master gets a stipend. 

I can’t say “why”, exactly, but maybe someone will tell me why, from this listing?

Absolute best math: homotopy theory (no surprises here)

Absolute worst math: hyperplane arrangements

Math I like: 

In no particular order: manifolds (not to be confused with very particular fields of 3- and 4-manifolds), real analysis, functional analysis, harmonic analysis, measure theory, category theory, numerical anything, probability theory, statistics, optimization broadly (including various [blank] programming)

Math I don’t like:

anything foundations, complex analysis, low-d topology, combinatorial topology, graph theory, combinatorics, analytic number theory, geometric group theory, discrete geometry, order theory, anything re: differential equations

Math I’m on the fence about:

algebraic geometry, algebraic number theory, differential geometry, game theory

Math I know nothing about:

Does it have to be Classical? No Medievals need apply?

oh, no, medieval would be more than fine! renaissance, even! that was actually what i meant by ‘era irrelevant,’ but i probably should’ve been a little more explicit in my wording.

In Cyrin city and world are the same. There are spaces beyond the walls - there must be, because the city does expand, slowly, the walls pushing out seemingly of their own accord. But everything that anyone could need is inside the walls of Cyrin. There is an ocean, small, maybe, but salt as tears, with waves and ships and two lighthouses, casting beams at each other across hundreds of miles. There are fields and plains and mountains, snow and sun, even true wildernesses, great trees growing from the ruins of older parts of the city. Deer wander there, and elephants; eagles and storks fly above the canopy of the forest.